George Carlin, H. L. Mencken and Falling Out Of "Like" With Obama.

Chronicle of a Journey from Youthful
Know-It-All to Old Fart Astonishment.

George Carlin auditioned yesterday at the Great Comedy Store. http://www.biography.com/search/article.do?id=9542307&page=print. He was 71, lived hard, fast and went out quick and pretty close to the way all of us must. "Too soon" is an academic term and depends entirely on one's point of view. Carlin often said. Absent stand-up comedy, he would like to have taught Linguistics at some university. His course woulda been "SRO" too. George mighta guest lectured at, say, UC Berkley's Journalism School or presented at the Peabody Journalism Awards where he'd surely have given his opinions on the sorry state of Investigative Reporting and "Headless Torso in Topless Bar!" news. Dhaljit Dalawa (right) amiably complained about that very headline on PBS a few years ago. She said Americans don't get nearly enough news, especially news about foreign countries. But as Rupert Murdoch's FoxNews holoids remind us 24/7/365 The USA and GOP are #1!http://gothamist.com/2007/07/02/daljit_dhaliwal.php.

FoxNews' Gresham's Law ("Bad Drives Out Good!") gave a new form of Trench Mouth to the Democratic opposition as personified now by Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton. This form is worse than Carlin's famous "Seven Dirty Words You Can't Say On Radio or TV" in that both Spine and Words quickly become terminally infected. http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/06/21/obama/print.html

Obama endorsed Bush's FISA compromise. This sent liberal talk-jocks into "WTFITS?" mode. It should! Clinton, his opponent for the party nomination started earlier. But she's older and way preferable to FoxNews' stalking horse. To pick a fairly recent example from an embarrassment of riches, Clinton condemned video game Grand Theft Auto-IV "We need to treat violent video games the way we treat tobacco or alcohol," Clinton declared. http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=gg9fp99q42q3t8djnsxxcllxqx616h9n "No one," as jounalist H. L. Menken wrote after the Scopes Monkey Trial ever went broke betting against the intelligence of the American people." To paraphrase the article above: Play GTA-IV for a few hours. Then go out at night. Look at a few parked cars. When you find an appealing one, see if you feel an overwhelming urge to carjack it. Ditto any neighborhood hookers. Take a kid with you for the sake of Scientific Validity. Point? I wonder whether Clinton or Obama might have come down against Scopes, Clarence Darrow and Mencken and for God and Tennessee if it meant winning the 2008
election. You can damn well guess where the opposition stands.